Thursday, June 16, 2011

"To race bicycles is to drink greedily from a bottomless chalice of agony. The sport and its heroes are only knowable, and then just barely, once you come to understand that suffering is cycling’s currency. And what that currency buys is the occasional — the very, very occasional — moment of exquisite glory.

The first thing you notice about professional cyclists is that, with few exceptions, they appear to live their internal lives in a heavily padlocked tomb of mental anguish. They are at once astonishingly young and improbably ancient, a result of the fact that they are paid for their agony. They are modern-day ascetics, working in the open-air monastery of the mountains of Europe, with helmets as tonsures, spandex as robes."

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workout of the day

swim of the day

mamil

quotients:

"Optimists these days learn English, pessimists learn Chinese, but realists learn how to operate an AK-47." .

“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.” .

“The only thing we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history.” - Friedrich Hegel quotes (German Philosopher (1770-1831)"

“The Fed has had very few periods of relatively good performance. For most of its history, it’s been a loose cannon on the deck, and not a source of stability.” - Milton Friedman (1999) .